Every now and again I look over my dad\u2019s letters from World War II. He was attached to an armored headquarters company that didn\u2019t go overseas, but he had friends who did serve in Europe during and after the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. Also, he had two brothers, one who served in Europe attached to a quartermaster (logistics) company in the Army, the other who served in the Pacific as a Marine.<\/p>\n
Reading my dad\u2019s letters and those from his friends and brothers, you get a sense of the costs of war. They mention friends who\u2019ve been killed or wounded in action; for example, a soldier who lost both his legs when his tank ran over a mine. (His fellow soldiers took up a collection for him.) They talk about strange things they\u2019ve seen overseas, e.g. German buzz bombs or V-1 rockets, a crude version of today\u2019s cruise missiles. They look forward to furloughs and trips to cities such as Paris. They talk about bad weather: cold, snow, mud. They talk about women (my dad\u2019s brother, Gino, met a Belgian girl that he wanted to marry, but it was not to be). But perhaps most of all, they look forward to the war\u2019s end and express a universal desire to ditch the military for civilian life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
All of my dad’s friends wanted to get out of the military and restart their civilian lives. They didn\u2019t want a military career \u2013 not surprising for draftees who thought of themselves as citizen-soldiers (emphasis on the citizen<\/em>). In their letters, they never refer to themselves as “warriors<\/a>” or “warfighters” or \u201cheroes,\u201d as our society is wont to do today when talking about the troops. War sucked, and they wanted no part of it. One guy was happy, as he put it, that the Germans were getting the shit kicked out of them, and another guy was proud his armored unit had a \u201ctake no prisoners\u201d approach to war, but this animus against the enemy was motivated by a desire to end the war as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n Reading these letters written by citizen-soldiers of the \u201cgreatest generation\u201d reminds me of how much we\u2019ve lost since the end of the Vietnam War and the rise of the “all volunteer” military. Since the 9\/11 attacks in particular, we\u2019ve witnessed the rise of a warrior\/warfighter<\/a> ideal in the U.S. military, together with an ethos that celebrates<\/a> all troops as \u201cheroes\u201d merely for the act of enlisting and putting on a uniform. My dad and his friends would have scoffed at this ethos \u2013 this idolization of \u201cwarriors\u201d and \u201cheroes\u201d \u2013 as being foreign to a citizen-soldier military. Back then, the country that boasted most of warriors and heroes was not the USA: it was Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n Discarding the citizen-soldier ideal for a warrior ethos has been and remains a major flaw of America\u2019s post-Vietnam military. It has exacerbated America\u2019s transition from a republic to an empire, even as America\u2019s very own wannabe Roman emperor, Donald Trump, tweets while America burns.<\/p>\n Men (and women) of the greatest generation served proudly if reluctantly during World War II. They fought to end the war as quickly as possible, and they succeeded. America\u2019s endless wars today and our nation\u2019s rampant militarization dishonor them and their sacrifices. If we wish to honor their service and sacrifice, we should bring our troops home, downsize our empire and our military budget, and end our wars.<\/p>\n William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views<\/a>. He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu<\/a>. Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author’s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every now and again I look over my dad\u2019s letters from World War II. He was attached to an armored headquarters company that didn\u2019t go overseas, but he had friends who did serve in Europe during and after the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. Also, he had two brothers, one who served in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-30681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30681"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30683,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30681\/revisions\/30683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30681"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=30681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}